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These Hands Have Not Been Idle – They’ve Been Beetle

It has been an interesting week – I hit one of those peculiar spots on learning curves that really impede projects from getting finished but make all future projects much easier to do, faster, better looking, what have you. The two projects that I have been working on the most are beetle holders & a Raspberry Pi I/O shield/mounting plate. The two projects have presented particular challenges in their own ways.

The Raspberry Pi I/O Shield

The photo of this shows you the iterative process behind the shield (numbering conventions being a little hinky notwithstanding). Each iteration has me and my calipers going back to the Pi to try and make sure I have I/O and standoffs in the right place (they aren’t always). This is very much the idea behind rapid prototyping – you’re able to quickly (or in my case not so much) iterate and get closer to what you need much more quickly.

Finishing touches will come later, but it’s been revealing getting everything together on that and making it more modular. Later projects are going to benefit heavily from having this already made.

The Beetle Holder

This guy is tough. It’s certainly my highest-poly project to date. It took a few days to just get the base model right, and this guy is going to have a neat gimmick I don’t really want to spoil here. It’s ambitious, and certainly the most complex thing I’ve done so far but I think it’s going to be really rewarding and I hope a lot of you folks are going to be cool with some giant beetles hanging out in your office later on!

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to keep to my one-article-a-day promise. For these two projects, there hasn’t been much worth writing about because I’m feeling out borders and finding new lessons – often in unrelated videos (all those times I mentioned “ApplyEdgeSoftening” in Rhino? Yeah, just use “FilletEdge” and highlight the polysurface you want to do it to. You can manually adjust handles!).

With these lessons, I’m probably going to backtrack to some of my earlier projects, too, like the Nintendo Switcherang & the print-in-place folding stand. There are some new tricks that those could use, especially since they’ve been able to get field tested.

I hope you can forgive me, and I hope this summer will have more cool new projects to show off!

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